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How to invoke pdftotext and extract first line of text from PDF file?

by punch_card_don (Curate)
on Mar 28, 2010 at 22:54 UTC ( #831519=perlquestion: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??
punch_card_don has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Mushrooming Monks,

After quite some Googling of "perl extract text from pdf" and a host of related permutations, I've concluded that good old pdftotext (part of XPDF) is the best way to go when all you want is a plain text string out of a PDF file. (Including a Perlmonks post by the author of perl module CAM saying so)

BUT - how, exactly, do I use it in my perl script?

That is, if I have foo.pdf in a directory on my server, and my own csript extract_text_from_pdf.pl in my cgi-bin, what is the correct syntax for 

$content = some-pdftotext-command('foo.pdf');
<code>
Then, what I really want is just the first line of text - that is, the
+ title at the top of the page - but I'm guessing it's not going to co
+nveniently insert carriage returns that I can recognize - or will it?
<p>

So even better would be
<code>
@lines =  = some-other-pdftotext-command('foo.pdf');

[download]
but let's not get unreasonable....

Thanks.




Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Comment on How to invoke pdftotext and extract first line of text from PDF file?
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Re: How to invoke pdftotext and extract first line of text from PDF file?
by punch_card_don (Curate) on Mar 28, 2010 at 23:18 UTC
    OK - figured it out - here's what worked for me: 

    open (FILE, "pdftotext -layout foo.pdf - |");
$title = <FILE>;
print "<p>$title\n";
close FILE;

    [download]



    Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: How to invoke pdftotext and extract first line of text from PDF file?
by LanX (Monsignor) on Mar 28, 2010 at 23:23 UTC
    That's what I did: 
      open ( my $fh, "-|","pdftotext -layout $file -") or
    die "error extracting $file";

    [download]

    But I really recommend using pdftohtml -xml -stdout instead if you need more reliability about text position, page-number and font (-family, -size and -color) used.

    Cheers Rolf

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      You can use backticks also: 
      $text = `$Globals::pdftotext_bin -layout $pdffile -`;
if ($?) {
  log_error(...)
}

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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